140 - When Urgency Disguises Itself as Growth
What if the thing you think is driving your growth is actually urgency?
In this Mini Musing, Sarah explores one of the sneakiest patterns of urgency: how easily it can disguise itself as dedication, productivity, ambition, or the desire to grow.
Sarah shares a personal example of catching herself in urgency while preparing for her upcoming work—and realizing that the feeling of “I have to do this now” was making it harder to access creativity, choice, and clarity.
She also explores the difference between urgency and agency, why moving quickly can cause us to repeat old patterns, and how stepping away from the problem—even briefly—can change what we are able to see.
The goal isn't to eliminate speed or become slow all the time. It's to develop more choices about how we move, so that urgency isn't making the decisions for us.
Episode Transcript:
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[00:00:00] Hello, fellow threshold moment people. Thank you for being here today. I want to talk to you about urgency and choice. I'm sure you know by now that I am running a free three-day program this September 10th, 17th... 10th, 15th, and 17th, called Opting Out of Urgency. But I wanna tell you about how the name came about.
I was in New York City, having a weekend with four of my closest friends, whom I don't often get to see, and I was laying in bed next to Janine Yoder, who's been on the po- podcast before, and who will come on in a few weeks. And I was like, "Ah, I don't know what to name it. It's like there's this space in between where all the magic happens, and if [00:01:00] we rush too hard, then we miss it.
And maybe I would call it unrushed." And Kate Northrop was also there, and she's like, "I don't think that's a word." I was like, "Well, shoot, because I've been using it in yoga classes for 20 years." Um, what I really realized is that when we go fast, and you've heard me say this before, when we go fast, we tend to repeat patterns that we've done before.
When we go fast, we could say something really hard that happened to us, and we can say it with enough speed that we don't have to feel it all the way. There's some beauty and health in that. When we respond really quickly to somebody who says something that triggers us, we are responding from a fight or flight that usually is not going to [00:02:00] come out with a win-win scenario.
When we move really fast, we often end in all or nothing scenarios where somebody wins and somebody loses. And relationally, we often end up repeating patterns and being like, "Ugh, how did I end up in this situation again?" With a new friend or in a new partnership, or maybe it's in your marriage, and you're like, "I thought we worked on this."
And often we are repeating same patterns, and when we do say, "Okay, wait. When I slow down and I notice that I exist, when I feel that I have a body with desires and needs, and when I state my needs and those needs break the unspoken contract that I had with this other person, not only does my body at a cellular level feel [00:03:00] often unstable and unsafe, but the other person's body, if they have an unspoken contract with you, often also feels threatened.
And if you are a people pleaser of any shade, color, breadth, depth, uh, that is another layer of discomfort to be with. So if we are really quick to need to fix it in order for us to feel okay We really edge out our ability to make the next growth pattern Urgency can sometimes be Can disguise itself as growth.
It is so tricky. Urgency is so tricky. Let me give you an example. This course that I have coming up after opting out of urgency is called Resourced, and I was so [00:04:00] excited by what Jessie Jean was doing on Instagram, which means in the background, she's been on social media for 16 years with different platforms.
But facing forward, she just started an account. It blew up. She tracked what it was that people were excited about. She moved on that one thing that they were excited about, which was learning how to speak clearly to camera. And she was hoping to sell 80 seats, and she sold in her first round 4,500, making $1.23 million.
And she was just, like, in tears and, "Oh, my gosh, this will change my family's life forever. I do this for my son." Uh, less than 30 days later, they relaunch, and they do $5.2 million.
But the really [00:05:00] cool thing is that it was following this format of, like, inch wide, mile deep. And I'm like, "Oh, my gosh" like, "What if I could reach so many people and do a lower price point where everybody can get on board and everybody can do it?" And I'm, like, waking up in the morning super excited, like, oh, like I was gonna throw out my whole program.
Where people had literally written in and said, "This has changed my life. I have a different relationship with time. I have a different relationship with my husband. I have a different relationship with my kids. I'm able to do things at work that I wasn't able to do before. I have ways to be with my body and move energy that were not there before.
I am noticing parts of myself that I never noticed before." Someone who has, like, written an entire memoir that was in her that was just, like, as she came into relationship with different parts of herself. Like, the testimonials keep coming in, and I have a [00:06:00] format that I've repeated and it works But I got so carried away with like, "Oh my gosh, this is a new way.
I'm gonna stay ahead of the curve. I'm gonna be able to reach more people. It's gonna be so great." And here's the thing. Again, my friend Kate. I was like, "Hey, uh, thinking about this thing", and she asked me a few really beautiful reflective questions, and some of you might be like, "Well, give me the deets." I don't remember, to be honest with you.
Um, I'll tell you a few honest business things. She said the industry standard for conversion, if you wanna just talk business and not how many lives you've touched, or the testimonials or, or what you've changed, is 3%. So what Jessie Jean did was, like, she went viral first, and then did this, right? She didn't create something and then hope that millions would come in.
Um, and then [00:07:00] she asked me a question of, like, "If you could do this program re- in any way you want..." And maybe it was even before the, beyond the program, like, you didn't even need to do the program, and if you... Like, what would it look like? What would your next steps be? And I was actually, when she asked me that, she's like, "Feel into your body."
I realized, I was like, I'm so hungry that I don't know. But I also realized that I was trying to, like, is this excitement or adrenaline? And so I had this urgency of like, I have to figure it out now, 'cause I have to talk to my affiliates, and I gotta start sending out. Am I gonna send out the emails to the people who have already taken, who can retake again at a retaker's price?
Like, I need a da, da, da, da, da. I've realized that there's a part of my system that likes urgency because it focuses me in and it [00:08:00] gets me moving. And if I don't have riverbanks, like something that's focusing in, then it's harder for me to get moving. But also something new and shiny, I love creating. So it's like, oh, recreate the whole program from scratch, even though I have three months of daily meditation drips already recorded for the program, and even though I have the general layout for the 12 weeks, even though often on the day of, like, I do add, like, what is new, what is real.
So it's just really interesting to catch myself in it, and it's been interesting last year as I was preparing for opting out of urgency when I started to feel urgency preparing for it
I think urgency can, the energy of it can be useful in [00:09:00] really small clips, but that most of us live there all of the time because the to-do lists never end. The schedules are ongoing, especially, I'll, I'll speak for myself, like having kids, and each kid having their own schedule, and my husband and myself having different schedules, and our friends, and our family, and our businesses.
Our cats, our dogs, like all the different people and animals and things that need scheduling and arranging and due dates can feel like it's never ending So opting out of urgency is creating a choice point. So as I sat in a car at 2:30 AM last year when I was supposed to be deep asleep on the first night of, uh, my friend's retreat, and I'm knowing that I need to write 20 emails [00:10:00] for my aff- like, as, like, affiliate copies so they have ideas of, like, what is this about?
What would I write from? And then my own emails. I start going urgency, agency, emergency. So 2:30 in the morning, I don't know if you all are like this, where it's like maybe there's some genius happening or maybe you're delusional. But I really got something from it 'cause I was like, what is the gency? I looked it up.
There's... I, I don't know why the suffix gency exists there, but to me, I'm like, if there's a merge without the gency, there's a beautiful blossoming of something new, but when you have a merge with a gency, it's like something new has to happen right now or death. Right? And urgency, to have an urge, an impulse, those all kind of come from inside, don't they?
But with a gency, it's like, no, this is [00:11:00] tim- time bound, and it has to happen right now. An agency. A, the prefix, often means without, so without the gency. Without the gency, without the time bound, must happen now, it often feels a lot more like choice. So I began thinking about different scenarios, like in the book Back to the Magic Shop or Into the Magic Shop, when Dr.
James Doty, who is a neurosurgeon, was doing a surgery on a four-year-old boy, and his associate or someone in training clipped a really, really important vein. Maybe it was an artery. Something not good. And his, this boy's hand, life is literally in his hands. And he immediately goes, well, he says, "I went back to the magic [00:12:00] shop."
And what that means for him was that when he was then a little boy, when he was a little boy and he grew up in a super traumatic household with a father who was alcoholic, who couldn't keep a job, with a mother who was suicidal, with a brother who had a very hard time with all of this, where they were often evicted and sometimes on the street, he came across a magic shop where the owner's mother was there, and she said, "I can't teach you magic tricks, but I can teach you real magic."
And so James Doty had such a rock in his shoe, like a pebble in his shoe, right? He had so much discomfort that when she gave him lessons to go home and practice, he practiced for hours. So the first portion that he learned was to attune to his body. Like, "Oh, I have a body?" And just focus on bodily sensations So there were four stages that she brought him through, [00:13:00] which eventually led to the stage of manifestation.
But what he did in this emergency as an adult who is now one of the top neurosurgeons in the country, was instead of like, "I have to fix it right now, and, uh, this could lead to death," it was he dropped into his body, he felt his feet on the ground, he was able to lower his heart rate, and then he used his hand and was able to find the exact place to block.
So he's attuning to intuition, but also repetition, and he's staying calm so that he can have agency within the emergency So what I found this week when I was feeling major writer's block and I was feeling a major timeline coming up Was that when it felt most like I should not leave my computer, and I should not leave the yurt, [00:14:00] and I should not join the group, and I should just keep my head down and work, work, work, work, work, which is where urgency gets confused with growth and dedication.
I broke the cycle, and I joined the group for a breathwork session. I had zero huge epiphanies during the breathwork session. You know, people are, like, having all these really big experiences. But what it did was it reset me, and then we jumped in the river that was right there, and I was like, "Whoa. I am the same person, but suddenly that list that has not changed feels so doable, and I'm pretty excited to go do it.
I know exactly what I wanna write about now." And it was this light bulb moment. It was another angle on urgency where I could go, "Okay. Every time I feel like I cannot break away from my [00:15:00] computer, I cannot leave until I get the thing done. Every time I can identify a certain feeling of tightness within me, and I think that urgency is my way to growth, urgency is my way to progress, if I go do something to reset my body, then I can return with a brain and a body that are more creative, that are more excited for the work that's ahead of me, that knows what I can do and what I can put down In the first day of opting out of urgency, oh, I'm like, should I tell all?
Should I say all this? I... Okay, I'm not gonna say that. I, I share a vision of what it's like when urgency is in the arena, the way that we all respond to it. And then I shared in that vision how we break away from it. So come to opting out of urgency or watch day one replay if it's already passed because it's so good.
And then what we [00:16:00] do is we look at a list, and we say, here's the physical, emotional, mental, energetic, spiritual, and relational realms I would love for you to write down anything that you can already do, that you already do that are pleasurable At a fast speed, at a medium speed, and at a slow speed Because when we start to notice that we do actually have other gears that we can go into without feeling like I only have fast or collapse, and where the fast is fight or flight, and the collapse is a version of freeze, we start to see can we do some things that are in the range of resonance where the fast action I take is focused and skilled?
Maybe even fun. Maybe it's like [00:17:00] fun dancing hard. Maybe it's surfing or mountain biking where your skill meets the speed. And medium may be like walking but having an intense conversation with somebody you love or going for a run. Slow is often like cooking, meditation, yoga nidra We start to realize that we have different paces, and then what feels true?
Is there a place where we feel more alive? Is there a place where we feel more resourced? And if slowing down is really hard, is there something that we can do that's more intense or that makes our brain feel safe so that we can practice slow with the body? We can have a moment of opting out of urgency so that we go from a brain that's working on Must [00:18:00] get this done.
Fight or flight. The default mode network in the brain in this stage is ruminating over the problem. The reticular activating system that is filtering what information gets in is only seeing the problem And when we do something for self-care and we start to move into a place of safety, the default mode network begins to daydream The reticular activating system can move into curiosity.
I wonder. So we actually start to change what we can perceive. Our reality begins to change. So as you practice changing speeds so that your reality and your perception can change, you can say like, "Oh, going slow, like taking a bath, would be really good for my physical body," but my mind is gonna be like, "You shouldn't be doing this till everything on your to-do list is done."[00:19:00]
What if you took your cellphone with you and you get back to some of the text messages, or you listen to a podcast? And some people would say, "Well, isn't that the opposite of the reason of taking a bath?" And I would say we're looking for small, doable pieces of pattern interrupt, pattern update, not like an all or nothing.
Like, it has to be a two-hour bath with the roses and the oils and the scents and the candles, or it doesn't count. We get to do the smallest piece available When we're in a state of constant urgency, nobody wins. It's hard to connect to our kids when they're saying, "Mom, look at this. Look at this picture I drew," or there's a sunset or there are trees.
There are just trees outside. There are seasons happening. It's hard to feel and [00:20:00] notice any of those if we're constantly in that stage. And urgency on a nervous system map is in the sixth realm of seven, which is called global high intensity activation, and it's notable that you could stay there for a good portion of your life.
They say this is like the girl boss energy, the hustle culture energy, and it usually lands with collapse after a long time of success. So urgency is often masked as success. It often comes with a reward of people, like, wanting you on their team and saying what a hard worker you are, financial benefit coming in.
So to opt out of urgency, we have to begin to decouple it from if I opt out of urgency, does it mean nobody [00:21:00] will want me? Does it mean I won't make the same money? And this is why we do the smallest doable pieces possible. Otherwise, it does generally land in burnout or injury I don't wanna say or a hospital visit, but it's not uncommon.
I laugh. Listen, like I laugh because my own pattern with it landed me with a horrific back as a teenager. Um, it has landed me on the floor and completely incapacitated. I know the pattern so well, and I have been patted on the back for it to be the one who could push through. And so as much as I first did it because I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is where all the magic of, of life happens when we can move from rushed to unrushed."
Alas.[00:22:00]
What we teach is what we still need. I got so many opportunities last year. The same thing showed up where it's like I'm gonna build a she-shed outside so I can have a new office, and I'm looking at, like, oh, it's $18,000 to do this, and then I need insulation, and then... And so this is, like, the double bind of, like, I'm either stuck trying to teach this course out of my bedroom, or I build a $25,000 she-shed.
It would've been more, actually, with electric going out there and, and all the rest. And as I slow down and I opt out of urgency, I was able to find another space that wasn't going to cost me anything more, that would give me privacy and a sense of professionalism. When I was at the airport and all of the flights in New York shut down, I could have gone into urgency and gotten into the long-ass line, and been like, "Ah!"
And I just, again, I just had the phrase opting out of urgency, and [00:23:00] I was like, "What is the next right step?" And I got one of the last rental cars that was available. But I really even just kept with that. Opting out of urgency has a little bit of a feel of trusting in the process. You don't have to fully let go, but just a little bit of like, okay, I am actually, I'm orienting around me.
I'm actually safe. The next right step is to find a way to get to the car rental facility. And then finding my way home
If you find yourself in any of this podcast, whether it's like before something big is about to happen where you're like, "I need to rearrange my whole house," or like, uh, it's all in on th- like, I have to move to Europe or, uh, go all out in my business. Like, right, it's like I'm gonna leave and go live in the woods or go all in.[00:24:00]
When you find these all or nothings, when you feel this, like, chronic tension, if you can notice any patterns where it feels like an emergency, and you feel like you've lost agency, I would invite you to join me for these three days where we first, on day one, look at where choice lives, how we can find it more easily, and also how we can identify urgency.
Day two, finding the sacred third when we're in double binds of I must, I can't, which is where urgency leads us, like living into the answer. And day three is the relational pattern. How do we upgrade relational patterns when we step out of urgency? And I'll talk about that from a cellular level as well.
So if you'd like to join us, check out the link. The replays are available through September 22nd this year
Hmm. May [00:25:00] we all take moments to opt out of urgency. Blessings